Читать книгу The Grampian Quartet - Nan Shepherd - Страница 23

ELEVEN

The Lustre Frock

‘She’s to hae a goon like the lave o’ them,’ said Geordie. ‘She’s nae to be an ootlin.’

Emmeline fingered the stuff of Aunt Leebie’s lustre frock, holding it taut and running her thumb along its weave.

‘It’s richt gweed stuff,’ she said. ‘Yer Aunt Leebie’ll be terrible offended if ye dinna wear it.’

Martha had said, when she brought the frock from Muckle Arlo:

‘I promised to wear it when I’m capped.’

Graduation had looked immeasurably distant then, but how rapidly the years had sped! She had still her year of professional training to go through before she would be a ‘finished teacher’; but her University course was almost over. Another month, and she would be dismissed into the world with a little tap on the head to signify that there was learning there … Initium sapientiae. …

Meanwhile there was the question of the frock. Martha considered it with a bad grace. The sacrificial mood was in abeyance. She had conceived a horror of the out-moded garment and would have repudiated her own hasty promise with great good-will. It was Dussie whose quick eye saw the possibilities of the lustre, her hands that transformed it. Martha was astonished by the result.

The Graduation morning arrived.

Geordie, Emmeline and Aunt Josephine came through the archway slowly. Of the three, Aunt Josephine was most at ease. She was superbly at her ease. She had travelled. She knew the ways of the world. She moved at her steady sober pace down the quadrangle, doubting nothing of the homeliness of those towers and pinnacles of granite towards which she floated with sails full-set. She would have made port as cheerfully in a barn.

Neither was Geordie perturbed, though stiff and awkward to appearance in his Sunday suit; and though he stood within the very haunt, the breeding-ground of that jeopardy that menaces a comfortable world, the virus of brains. For, holding still to his opinion that brains were a vexing agitation, he had yet of late kept silence on the matter and ruminated over what he saw; since he saw Martha reaching the very crown and proper end, the acme − as he supposed, being uninformed to the contrary and knowing nothing of the cunning whereby the university makes mention to her sons of only the beginning of wisdom* − the acme of instruction, without any alteration so far as he could see in her power or willingness to wash his sweaty socks and clear away the remnants of a meal. Moreover he had the reassuring persuasion that he had the right to be where he was. He set foot in the precincts with the confidence of a man for whom a place is prepared. Had not his daughter won it for him? And no gliding motors, no proud and peacocked women, could take away his security. It was Emmeline with her pretensions to gentility who was embarassed. Waddling under her load of fat, smelling of perspiration, with a button missing from one of her grey cotton gloves, she stared around uneasily, convinced that the majority of that animated throng had eyes for her; and with a good conceit of herself in spite of her uneasiness, keeked about in the presumptuous hope of being seen by someone who might admire and report her state. Being recognised by no one but Luke (who existed merely as husband to that Dussie) she yielded herself with but a hoity grace to his guidance, and followed behind his lean length up the stairway of the Mitchell Hall, indignant at his easy thinness and turning a critical eye upon the company with which she moved. ‘Some gey ordinary jiffs,’ she thought. She had been very uncertain what she was to see in a concourse gathered under the roof of the great hall of the University, and was secretly reassured by seeing numbers of men and women not too unlike herself.

From the glens and farms, the fishing villages and country towns, the fathers and the mothers had come.

Here, and not in the granite walls, not in lecture-room nor laboratory nor library, nor even in the mind and character of those who taught, was the true breeding-ground of Geordie’s jeopardy. Here, for this one day, was the creative power behind the University’s glory and achievement. Twice a year she gathered for an hour the sources of her life, that he who would might look and understand. Geordie was part of this great spectacle, no spectator merely. By his ploughman’s gait, his misshapen shoulders, his broken nails and fingers ingrained with earth, his slow rough speech, his unabashed acceptance of himself, he brought into that magnificent hall the sense of a laborious past, of animal endurances, of the obstinate wholesome conservative earth. With him came the mind’s humbleness. He symbolised its ultimate dependences, its elemental strength.

Part also of this spectacle for the imagination was Aunt Josephine, who had been piloted by Dussie to the gallery and sat pleased with all she saw and pleasing all who saw her. In her was manifest that substantial Leggatt imperturbability, sure of its own worth and ways, positive, that gives direction and stability to the questioning mind.

Part too was the woman who sat on Geordie’s farther side, and shared with him her printed list of graduands, Emmeline having fixed very securely on to the sheet served to them. With her exquisitely gloved finger she pointed out to him the name of her son (‘my youngest’) and he sought for Martha’s and showed it her, pressing his thick discoloured thumb on the paper (‘ma auldest an’ ma youngest tae. I’ve bit the ane − ma ain, like,’ he said).

‘Yon was a gey grand duchess I had to sit aside me,’ he told them later, at lunch in Dussie’s flat. ‘A terrible fine woman.’ A woman of race, mother of sons who were to make an illustrious name yet more illustrious in government and law and literature.

Part also was the washerwoman with ragnails and sucked hands where the flesh had swollen in ridges round her wedding-ring, whose daughter went in crêpe-de-chine; and the minister, hollow of cheek and with the eyes of a fanatic, and his shabby sunny wife, clapping her hands at the antics of the laddies, at heart a halarackit boy herself.

Martha, as part of the obvious spectacle, discovered that graduation was after all not very exciting. It was ordinary and inevitable, like stepping out of a train when you reach your destination. She was excited none the less; and her secret excitement had a double cause. Half was in Luke’s parting words to her that evening − ‘We’re off tomorrow. Mind, you are coming to stay with us.’ The other half, surprisingly in a Martha who seemed to care so little for the outer integuments of living, was the lustre frock. It was so different from every other frock she had possessed. Dussie called it her inspiration. Everything had gone right in its making. Wearing it, Martha had an uncanny sense of being someone other than herself; as though she had stepped carelessly to a mirror to dress her hair and had seen features not her own looking out from the glass. The mere wearing of the frock could not have changed her: but like the mirror it served to make her aware of alteration; and she seemed to herself farther from her folk and her home. Wearing the lustre frock, she had no Ironside instincts. She did not belong to the Leggatts. Across the mirror of lustre there flitted an unfamiliar Martha with alien desires; and when some days after her capping she received one of Aunt Jean’s brusque notes of invitation, that specified the dates on which she was expected to arrive at and depart from Muckle Arlo, Martha set it aside and did not answer. The following day brought another note, as brief and as peremptory as Aunt Jean’s:

DEAR MARTY,

The Beyond at whose Back we are meanwhile situated is a Gloomy Mountain Pass much infested by midges. Come at once.

LUKE

‘But ye canna nae ging to yer aunt’s,’ said Emmeline aghast.

‘I could go later.’

‘Deed ye’ll dae nae sic thing. Ye maun ging whan she’s bidden you.’

‘Not if I’m going elsewhere,’ said Martha. ‘I shall write and ask if I may come to her afterwards.’

Emmeline bickered for the next two days. This was a strange riding to the ramparts of the citadel that she was counting on Martha to reconquer. When the portcullis had been lifted, that the girl should turn in the saddle and canter away to other ploys! ‘She wunna lat you come,’ she said to Martha.

‘I suppose I shan’t miss a very great deal,’ Martha answered.

Queer contagion from a frock!

Aunt Jean having signified that the later date was approved, Martha went to Luke and Dussie.

Her fortnight in the hills had no reality. The hours floated past. Night glided after night. Muckle Arlo was on another earth. After two years Martha was amazed to find how similar everything was and how differently she regarded it. The black currants were over but there were red currants and rasps to pick. Martha again gathered currants and Aunt Leebie cried to her to wipe her feet; and Aunt and Uncle Webster came to Sunday dinner.

Yet nothing was the same. She was not excited but bored by her bedroom, and Leebie with the physic bottle was ludicrous; and when she changed on Sunday morning, after breakfast and the making of the beds, to her best apparel (which was of course the lustre frock), she chafed a little at kinship. Relations … but what relation had they to her soul? She set out for church living again in ecstasy her days among the hills.

‘Ye’ve connached it,’ Aunt Leebie was saying. ‘Clean connached.’

She was pulling her lustre frock about, scraping with her nail at its embroidery. But what right had she to be displeased? She had given the frock. And Martha remembered how Luke had approved it and Dussie had waltzed her round the room when she saw it on.

‘That’s gey guideship it’s gotten,’ the old woman was muttering.

Martha had no leisure to be touched.

‘I’m nae nane cornered wi’ Matty this time,’ Leebie said to Jean.

A relation … but what relation had she to their soul?

* Motto of Aberdeen University: ‘Initium sapientiae timor Domini.’